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ruphus13 writes "Linden Labs has talked about Open Sourcing aspects of their platform for a while, but have not always followed through. Now, the OpenSimulator project has been gathering some solid momentum, and this was followed by an announcement by IBM that showed interoperability between OpenSimulator and Linden Servers. What this means is that you can use a Second Life client to log on to an OpenSim server. Beyond that, anyone can run their own server. 'Working with the protocols derived from the official Second Life client, and a knowledge of how Second Life works, these people have implemented their own compatible server code.' It is only a matter of time before users will be able to move profiles, virtual goods, and other elements of their 'second life' on to any server in a truly open world, thereby threatening Linden Labs' virtual world experience. With Google and Sun at the fringes of this space, things are going to get very interesting, virtually speaking."

jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the computer network supporting CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will begin smashing particles into one another later this year. We've discussed some of the impressive capabilities of this network in the past. "Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a 'parallel Internet.' Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the U.S. infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an 'evolution of the Internet.' New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network"

You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them.

An anonymous reader writes "As you're probably already aware, Charlton Heston passed away yesterday. Wired has a piece looking back at Heston's extremely notable work in the sci-fi genre, with roles in films like "Planet of the Apes" and "Soylent Green". 'Heston also roared out some of sci-fi's greatest and most memorable lines, bringing his macho swagger and over-the-top intensity to the screen in movies like 1973's food freak-out flick Soylent Green and the Planet of the Apes series. In a pivotal scene from 1968's Planet of the Apes (see clip), Heston's character, time-traveling astronaut George Taylor, utters the first words spoken by a human to the simian rulers of a bizarro future Earth: "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!'"

An anonymous reader writes "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays that could lead to a major extinction event — and Earth may be right in the line of fire. Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine reports: 'Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life. A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.'"

WirePosted writes "A CDC research study released this past week indicates that the physical and mental health of many Americans is being adversely affected by a lack of sleep. According to the study, a part of the organization's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, one in ten US citizens are consistently failing to get enough sleep every night. Almost 40% of the people surveyed didn't get enough sleep for more than a week every month. The article notes that this trend can have far-ranging implications for health beyond simple fatigue."

V!NCENT tips us to a write-up about an addition to MSI's Ecolution motherboard which harvests heat from the chipset to power a fan. The device is based on a Stirling engine. The heat from the chipset expands a trapped gas, which pushes against a piston to generate power. The article contains a YouTube video of how the device works. According to MSI, the device has 70% efficiency.

coondoggie writes to mention that a new optical technique for sensing small amounts of molecules in a person's breath has been developed by a researcher for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The goal is to create a fast, low-cost method for detecting disease. "In this approach, NIST researchers analyze human breath with 'frequency combs,' which are generated by a laser specially designed to produce a series of very short, equally spaced pulses of light. Each pulse may be only a few million billionths of a second long. The laser generates light as a series of very narrow frequency peaks equally spaced, like the teeth of a comb, across a broad spectrum."

holy_calamity writes "Researchers have successfully added two 'unnatural' DNA letters to the code of life. They created two artificial base pairs that are treated as normal by an enzyme that replicates and fixes DNA inside cells. This raises the prospect of engineering life forms with genetic code not possible within nature, allowing new kinds of genetic engineering."

sleeplesseye writes "In a speech at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes, Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading, and has urged governments to force ISPs to adopt such policies. McGuinness criticized Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' pay-what-you-want business model, saying that 'the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire'. He also accused ISPs, telcos, device makers, and numerous specifically named companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Facebook of building 'multi billion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it', and of being 'makers of burglary kits' who have made 'a thieves' charter' to steal money from the music industry. The full text of his speech has been posted on U2's website."

TeraBill writes "It seems that the California Energy Commission is looking to give utilities in the state the power to control the thermostats in private homes via a radio signal. The idea is that during times of significant energy crunch, the utilities could force thermostats to higher temperatures rather than having to implement a rolling blackout. The thermostats have been around for a while and new ones were on display at the CES show in Vegas this week. While I can see the argument for it, we just had a kid take over a tram system with a remote control, so how long before our thermostat gets hacked by the neighbors. And I'd almost rather have the power drop than have someone significantly raise the temperature in my home if I had a computer running there. (UPS and a graceful shutdown versus cooking something.)"

drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Mercury News reports that a vulnerability in the way Second Life protects a user's money has been identified. Risks for users are reportedly limited because the researchers say the flaw can be quickly patched. The flaw exploits a known problem with Apple's QuickTime - when a virtual character passes by an infected object planted by hackers, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. Hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious Web site that then allows them to 'take over the user's avatar and force it to hand over its Linden cash. Second Life is recommending that users disable streaming video playback in the Second Life viewer except when you are attending a known and trusted venue.' The hack raises tough questions for operators of virtual worlds. Should they be as secure as banks and guarantee the safety of money and property that characters in the world possess?"

firegate writes "Yahoo Tech is reporting that the Microsoft Zune, having been heavily discounted for the holiday season, 'is currently Amazon's top-selling music player, beating out the new iPod Nano and the 80GB iPod on the 'Bestsellers in Electronics' list.' An Associated Press report even indicates that the Zune's newfound popularity has left it in short supply, sold out in many locations. Is this a sign that a true competitor, from Microsoft no less, has finally broken into the Apple-dominated MP3 player market? And will this spell more success for Windows-media based music subscription services like Napster?"